Sylvia Plath wynalazła cierpienie.

'I talk to God but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak'

Plath's artistry lies in her gift for capturing  some of lifes most pivotal, most raw and vulnerable moments with an exquisite lyricism.  At the same time her confessional style of writing, at times, possesses a brutal frankness. A self described victim of interospection, Plath's works read as a deep analysis of the inner workings of the Human mind. It's insecurities and flaws, it's sense of wonder, hope and imagination; and the fear invoked by the transience of such qualities. Focusing equally on the experiences in life that unite us all, and of course the emotions that carry us through them, the transitions from childhood to adulthood, innocence to experience, life to death all feature heavily within the collection. The addition of the excerpts from her notebooks over several years give incredible insight into the processes Plath went through in her writing, demonstrating how to find the parts of herself she scattered throughout her work. An anthology for the weary, the disillusioned and the discontented, I defy anyone to read this collection and come away unchanged. 

This is a collection of short stories, essays and notebook entries by Sylvia Plath. As a collection it doesn’t gel and seems disjointed but what it does do is give hints of how Plath’s writing style developed.
 
 The story this collection is named after, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, has a narrator that feels like an earlier version of The Bell Jar.

The works are a mixture of dark, coming -of-age, matter of fact and light comedy. Some are less interesting than others, and I would have been less interested in those if I had not read two biographies about Sylvia Plath. This helped me to connect to this book:

In Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams Plath is cryptically sharing her own fears of having electric shock therapy. I also recognised Rose and Percy B is about her neighbours when she lived in Devon, England, with Ted Hughes. Other works also have a relevance in some way which would not have been obvious to me without reading the biographies.
 
What’s amazing about Sylvia Plath is in her short life how much she has written and the variety.